The Shared Language Resources (Shared LRs)

We are happy to announce that the LREC new initiative "Share your LRs"
has met with great success, with more than 200 LRs (data, tools, services) shared with submissions to LREC 2014. We expect even more LRs will be shared with Workshops submissions and main conference final papers.
Each LR is described through the set of features of the LRE Map.

Most LRs are shared through access to a devoted URL, while for about 1/3 the LR itself was uploaded with the submission. These LRs (and their description from the LRE Map) are available in a special LREC
repository.

We challenge the LREC community to demonstrate the benefits of sharing resources.

The Open Challenge

LREC launches a new initiative around these Shared LRs, organising an Open Challenge.

Firmly believing in the power of sharing resources and in the creativeness of the public, encouraging reusability of LRs, reproducibility of language technology (LT) research/experiments, etc.,
this initiative promotes the "culture" of sharing and re-using LRs and technology for the common good.

We ask everyone to "use the Shared LRs for whatever use/task they are interested/able to do", from the simplest to the more sophisticated.

We wish to promote and reward creative and original uses of available LRs.

The only condition is that participants should use at least a tool or resource which they did not create themselves.

Challenge contributions will be divided into the following categories:

production of LRs

interoperability of LRs

application of shared LRs

Some (non exhaustive) examples of tasks/usages are:

using your own tools on third-party shared LRs

using others’ shared tools for processing your own data, extracting new information, etc.

testing shared tools on new languages or language variants

integrating one or more third-party shared LRs/tools into a new application

merging shared resources, producing new, larger or different LRs

converting LRs to RDF and/or integrating into the (Linguistic) Linked Open Data cloud

deploying a new LR platform, with new service interfaces to utilize the LRs, and creating workflows to combine services

comparing/evaluating similar shared resources (e.g. focusing on sentiment lexicons, reporting on the best performing/simple to use/best documented/easy to replicate/etc. LR)

using a shared corpus to train a new model

creative, unforeseen usage of shared LR/tool

finding uses emphasizing LRs for languages other than English

exploiting shared LRs for compiling another one, for training a tool, etc.

application of LRs/tools to benefit less resourced languages.

Along with descriptions of successful experiments and case studies, we also encourage reporting negative results and problems encountered when re-using shared LRs.

We aim to coordinate the Open Challenge with other challenges/hackathons in different LREC workshops in order to facilitate synergies between them and these shared LRs. We thus encourage also the use of shared LRs for replicating/improving results already submitted to shared challenges promoted by different workshops at LREC.

In any case, we do not mean to replace or compete with other shared tasks organized at LREC and its workshops. While double submission is welcome, the broadly defined criteria of the Open Challenge and the more focused shared tasks shall remain sufficiently distinct to
guarantee an independent evaluation.

What do we offer?

At LREC we will award prizesbased on a number of criteria to be announced (e.g., creativity and originality of the approach, number of resources involved, number of languages, depth and breadth of LR integration, etc. …).

Prizes will also be awarded to the LR that was most exploited!
Depending on the quality and quantity of responses and accompanying reports, we may produce a special LREC publication: the LREC Shared LRs Challenge Proceedings.

We shall also organise one or more special Poster sessions during the Conference

We will also select papers to invite for submissions (of extended version) to the LRE Journal.

Schedule and Report

Participants should send a two-page description of what they have done with the third-party shared LRs by 2 May 2014 using the following format:

Title (related to the use), Author(s), Affiliation
Abstract
Description:

identifying which Shared LR(s) have been used

type of usage/applications (see examples above, or other)

motivation of the usage/experiment

evaluation of the result

difficulties in usage/integration

also negative experiences, well founded

if the result of the usage is a new LR that can be shared, please provide access information